1. Field of the Invention
Example embodiments of the present invention relate to a method for driving a liquid crystal display (LCD) device, an array substrate, a method of manufacturing the array substrate, and an LCD device having the same. More particularly, example embodiments of the present invention relate to a method for driving an LCD device in a transflective mode with a mono-cell gap, an array substrate, a method of manufacturing the array substrate and an LCD device having the same.
2. Description of the Related Art
Generally, a liquid crystal display (LCD) device displays an image by controlling the transmittance of liquid crystal using an electric field. LCD devices may be classified into transmissive-type, reflective-type and transflective-type LCD devices. In a transmissive-type LCD device, a backlight device provides light to the LCD device. In a reflective-type LCD device, the LCD device displays an image using natural light. A transflective LCD device is formed by combination of the transmissive-type and the reflective-type LCD devices.
In the transflective-type LCD device, a transmissive electrode and a reflective electrode are separately formed on one pixel area and a pixel voltage is applied to the transmissive electrode and the reflective electrode through one TFT. An electric field that is generated by the pixel voltage and common voltage of a common electrode is applied to a liquid crystal (LC) layer and liquid crystal is realigned.
A liquid crystal cell on a transmissive area alters the phase of incident light by a ½λ retardation. However, incident light into the reflective electrode passes through the liquid crystal layer two times before and after reflection from the reflective electrode in a reflective area. Thus, a multi-cell gap mode is used in the LCD device. In a multi-cell gap LCD device, a cell gap on the reflective area is half of a cell gap on the transmissive area so that the transmitting lengths of total light are substantially equal to each other. As a result, phases of light emitted from the transmissive area and the reflective area are substantially equal to each other. Thus, steps are formed on a TFT substrate or a color filter substrate so that the cell gap in the reflective area is smaller than the cell gap in the transmissive area.
The multi-cell gap LCD device is suitable for the transflective mode. However, the multi-cell gap LCD device may include many defects from a manufacturing process. For example, alignment layer deposition defects caused by the steps of the reflective area, alignment defects such as polyimide agglomeration, and texture defects may occur. In particular, bruising may occur, and contrast ratio may be decreased in the transflective mode.